The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (34 page)

Rentiers opened his mouth in a large silent grin of appreciation at his own cleverness. How Holmes kept his composure in the face of this insolent young scapegrace, I did not know. Rentiers took another spoonful of soup. Then he said, ‘Anything else you wanted to know?'

‘Yes,' said Holmes courteously, ‘Why did Mr and Mrs Carew refer to you in their conversations and letters as “The Organ Grinder”?'

It was a pistol-shot through a bullseye. Rentiers put his spoon down. From his shaven neck to the roots of his hair, his young face went the shade of ripe raspberries. He said not a word but rose from his chair, and walked from the dining-room without a glance to either side. We never saw him again.

‘Holmes! How the devil did you know?'

Holmes stared after him.

‘I have not the least idea, Watson. No more than an instinctive sense of human frailty. But you, of all people, my dear fellow, will acknowledge that in such matters I am very seldom wrong. Now, at least, we may finish our meal unmolested by the chatter of that young jackanapes.'

In that, he was right. No one but the Chinese waiter came near us for the rest of the evening. After Holmes's casual insult to a consular official, we had advertised ourselves as lepers.

IV

The name of Sherlock Holmes meant little to the English colony of Yokohama, an isolated and inward-looking community of adventurers and younger sons who had been despatched to the East so that they should not incur scandal or expense at home. The Consul and his officers presided over them for all the world like schoolmasters trying to manage unruly boys.

It suited Holmes that he and I should be regarded as nothing but two more ‘griffins', as new arrivals are contemptuously called. He would not have given two-pence for the entire English settlement. When he drew my attention, it was to admire the natural beauty of the Japanese girls with the blue-black
bandeaux
of their
coiffure
immaculately dressed so that not a single hair was out of place, the piled tresses revealing the prettiness of each face and the ivory perfection of the nape and ears. Or else he would be struck by the reality of Japanese life and how perfectly its scenes resembled the decorations on fan, ornamental tray, or screen. He watched the jugglers in the street, many of them children, and the skill with which a spinning top seemed to move as if by wizardry.

Our first encounter with the members of the Carew household was when Holmes interviewed Rachel Greer, a Eurasian girl who had assisted Mary Jacob in the nursery, and Hanauye Asa. They were brought to the secretary's office in the club and left with us. These were the two who had been Mission School pupils before entering service and neither of them faltered in her story. Their honesty was so palpable that I confess my heart sank a little for Mary Jacob. Rachel Greer spoke for both of them, interpreting many of Hanauye Asa's replies. Yet even to judge by her expression and manner, Hanauye Asa spoke the entire truth of what she had seen.

‘Be kind enough to explain,' said Holmes gently to Rachel Greer who stood before the desk like a naughty child, ‘how it was that you saw Mary Jacob in Mr Carew's room the evening before his death. I am correct, I believe, in saying that the only door to the room was locked at that moment during the few minutes the nurse was away and that the nurse had posted the two of you to see that no one came near, while she was absent?'

‘Yes,' said the girl earnestly. ‘No one passed.'

‘No one?' asked Holmes gently. ‘But Mary Jacob passed, did she not?'

Rachel Greer shook her head. ‘Not while we were there. We heard a sound, while the nurse was out of the room. The window banged. We knew it could not be Mr Carew, for he was too ill to get out of bed. We looked through the keyhole and saw Mary Jacob standing in front of the mirror.'

‘Which mirror?'

‘The triple-mirror on top of the cabinet, where the medicines were kept.'

‘Just standing there?'

Rachel Greer nodded. ‘She stood for a moment, looking at it. Then she looked down at something in her hands. Then I think she moved away and we could not see her.'

‘What else happened?'

‘Someone in the opposite room downstairs, on the far side of the courtyard, shone a bright light to see what had made the noise. It was Mrs Carew who shone the light from the nursery window opposite when she heard the window bang. But she swore she saw nothing in the garden or the house. Almost at once, we heard the nurse coming back and Mrs Carew calling us down. She asked what the noise was but we could not tell her. We told her that Miss Jacob was in the room.'

‘And what did Mrs Carew say?'

‘She said it was impossible for Mary Jacob to be in the room unless she had passed us. Just after that, Mary Jacob was in the nursery.'

Not by a single facial movement did Holmes suggest that Rachel Greer might not be telling the truth. Yet if she was, then Mary Jacob was the last person to be alone with Carew on the final night of his life except his nurse. Rachel Greer and Hanauye Asa stood guard outside the door all night, on Mrs Carew's insistence, so that even when the nurse was absent for a few minutes no one could enter. From the time that the two servants had looked through the keyhole until the moment of Carew's death, no one but Mary Jacob or the nurse could have administered the three grains of arsenic that had killed him. The nurse had already been acquitted of all suspicion.

‘Had you ever seen Mary Jacob in Mr Carew's bedroom at any other time?' Holmes asked. The girl stared at her hands with an air of modesty.

‘Before he was ill, yes.'

‘Did she take the children in there to see their father?'

Something rather like a smirk of embarrassment touched Rachel Greer's lips.

‘She went to him alone. When Mrs Carew was out, playing cards or riding.'

The point was so hopeless that Holmes seemed to give it up.

‘And what of the letters belonging to Mrs Carew that Mary Jacob took?'

‘Mrs Carew used to tear up letters after she read them and throw the pieces in the basket. Miss Jacob would take the pieces and put them together. She and Miss Christoffel. She showed them to me. I saw her take them from the basket.'

‘Why did she take them?'

Rachel Greer shrugged. ‘To find out what Mrs Carew was doing. Things that she should not do. Some of the letters were from a gentleman.'

‘And what else did you see?'

The girl looked up at him, direct and sincere in her emphasis.

‘She used to copy Mrs Carew's writing. Her signature. I saw a paper where she had written Mrs Carew's signature. She copied other writing as well. She copied Annie Luke.'

There seemed no more to be done. Holmes thanked the two girls and then paused.

‘One moment,' he said quietly. ‘Mr Carew's bedroom faced the nursery, did it not? Across the little lawn?'

‘Yes,' said Rachel Greer simply.

‘How many other rooms were there to either side of his?'

‘None on one side. On the other side there was Mrs Carew's room.'

‘So they slept in the two adjoining rooms on that last night. Was there a door from one to the other?'

‘There was a door but it was locked. On Mr Carew's side, it was bolted at the top and bottom by the nurse who was with him.'

‘Did you see Mrs Carew go into her own room that last night?'

‘Yes. She went in at eleven o'clock and she did not come out until the morning. It was just before they sent for the doctor and the ambulance to take Mr Carew to the hospital. But it was impossible for Mrs Carew to go through the other door between the rooms. She must come out on to the landing.'

‘No one was with Mr Carew when the nurse was away for a few minutes during the night?'

Rachel Greer shook her head again. ‘Mr Carew was alone then. No one could go to him. We stayed outside the door all the time, on the landing. Mrs Carew did not come out of her room and she could not get through the other door. The Consul's men examined that door between the rooms to see if it had been tried.'

Later that evening I could not forbear saying to Holmes that our client had cooked her own goose. She was Carew's lover, either spurned by him or infected by his dreadful disease. She had ordered and bought ‘plenty poison', as the chemist called it, for Carew's tonic. The three bottles of Fowler's Solution of Arsenic had been found in the house after the man's death. All three were nearly empty. A lethal dose of it had found its way into him. Much as Edith Carew might have hated her husband in secret, it was impossible to see how she could have got near him during the night when the fatal dose was administered. Short of believing that the doctors or nurses had poisoned the poor devil, Mary Jacob was the only suspect. If she had been in the room alone with him the evening before his death, she had only to empty an entire ounce of Fowler's Solution into his brandy and soda. By then he was delirious and calling for his drink. Fowler's Solution in Japanese pharmacies contains no lavender. It is intended to be tasteless and would certainly be so in a stiff brandy of the kind Carew drank. Who but Mary Jacob could have done it?

Holmes sat in his chair, eyes closed and fingertips pressed together under his chin, as I listed the evidence that would hang Mary Jacob. Then he said lightly, ‘You have something still to learn about circumstantial evidence, Watson. It is never more suspect than when there is too much of it. There is too much of it in this case. Far too much. If the wind should shift to another quarter, the accusation will lie in quite a different direction.'

Next morning we were taken by appointment to interview Miss Mary Jacob at the British Naval Prison. It was a beautiful winter morning on The Bluff, milder by far than anything in England, the elegant villas and bungalows commanding a fine view of Tokyo Bay. At the prison, they had made a cell for her from a room in the commandant's quarters. It was bare enough with its bed, chairs, a table under its barred window, a smaller one by the bed. Whatever passion Walter Carew may have felt for her, Mary Jacob was not a beauty but more of a simple village lass. Small wonder if her elder brother took her under his wing. Her dark hair was rather scragged back just then and the strong lines of her face reminded me a little of Kate Webster, who had gone to the gallows twenty years earlier for killing her mistress with an axe. Mary Jacob's face had an air of resentment, even towards those who had come to help her. There was resolve in the line of her chin and a natural anger burned at the corners of her wide cheekbones. When she turned her brown eyes upon us, there was the look of fear and hate that one sees in a cornered animal.

She sat at the table, Holmes sat opposite her, and I at the end.

‘Miss Jacob,' said Holmes after we had introduced ourselves, ‘I do not conceal from you that your case is one of the most difficult that has lately come my way.'

She scowled at him and said belligerently, ‘They are all against me. Because of him.' The sullen accusation would do little to help her.

‘That may be so,' Holmes said persistently, never once raising his voice. ‘What concerns me more than the people you say are against you is the amount of evidence which is undoubtedly against you. It is more than enough to hang you, unless you pull yourself together. Now, if you please, we will have truthful answers to questions.'

She looked up in astonishment, as if her defender had just slapped her face, when he dealt with her in this manner.

‘First,' said Holmes, ‘you bought enough arsenic from Maruya's Pharmacy in Yokohama to kill Mr Carew several times over.'

‘Because they told me to. He asked me to get it.'

‘At Maruya's?'

‘No, not at any place in particular, only to get it.'

‘Miss Jacob,' he said quietly, ‘there is incontrovertible evidence that you bought that poison. There is no evidence whatever, apart from your own assertion, that you were ever asked to get it.'

‘I didn't even know what it was!'

‘Come!' said Holmes gently. ‘The order was in your own handwriting.'

‘Fowler's Solution? I didn't know what Fowler's Solution was! Only a tonic. I wrote down what he told me.'

‘But when he died, you went to the chemist and asked for that writing back, did you not? Is that the action of an innocent person?'

‘I was frightened!' At last there was something that sounded like a cry.

‘So you might well be,' said Holmes in the same quiet voice, ‘but more frightened, perhaps, if you were guilty than if you were innocent. The truth might protect innocence but never guilt.'

From time to time, I could not help reflecting upon the worldly success that might have awaited Holmes in a career of cross-examination at the Criminal Bar. Yet I was more than a little anxious at the tone of scepticism that he continued to employ upon Mary Jacob. With the weariness of an unbeliever, he turned to the next topic.

‘You were seen by two independent witnesses taking the torn fragments of Mrs Carew's letters from the wastepaper basket. Why?'

‘I thought they were mine!'

‘How could Mrs Carew's letters be yours?'

The tears began to sparkle as the poor young nursery governess spoke of her home and her family.

‘She kept my letters from home and never let me have them. I never received my mother's letters to me all the time I was in that house. Never an answer to mine. Perhaps she stopped my letters as well. Only she wrote to my home and told them how happy I was and how well treated. Well treated, Mr Holmes? She used me like a slave! I thought perhaps they were my letters from home torn up and thrown in the basket, so that I should not see nor answer them.'

‘Perhaps your mother had not written to you.'

‘I'm not a fool.' The anger burned again at the points of her cheekbones. ‘Even Mrs Carew's brother, when he came out from England, said I'd been written to.'